The Fix

by David Baldacci

  “So does that mean DIA doesn’t do it?”

  “I don’t. I can’t speak for others.”

  “What else?”

  “In 2008 we got approval to conduct offensive counterintelligence clandestine ops both domestically and abroad.”

  “How would you do that?”

  “Pretty basic stuff. Planting moles, disseminating disinformation, negatively impacting a country’s information systems. You might be interested to know that we coordinate with the Bureau on that last one. Then in 2012 we expanded our clandestine collection efforts. We took over the Defense Department’s HUMINT efforts and beefed up our espionage ops overseas, obviously focusing on the military component.”

  “What’s your focus these days?”

  “Nothing too surprising. Islamic terrorists including ISIL and Al Qaeda, North Korea, Iran, particularly weapon and nuclear technology transfers, and the Chinese and Russians beefing up their military capabilities.”

  “How about the Russians hacking us to try to influence our politics?”

  “That would be a yes, Decker. Strikes right at the fundamentals of our democracy.”

  “So a lot of ground to cover.”

  “Which is why we have about seventeen thousand people working on it.”

  “You talked about planting moles. You guys ever have spies in your ranks?”

  She nodded and her features turned grim. “All intelligence agencies have. The worst for us was probably Ana Belén Montes. Very high-ranking analyst here and very well respected. It was before my time. Turned out she’d been spying for Cuba for over twenty years. Did a lot of damage and probably cost some people their lives.”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “Not surprising. She was arrested right when 9/11 was going down. That pretty much trumped every other story out there for months.”

  “How’d they nail her?”

  “Good old-fashioned detective legwork. And our cause was helped by the fact that spies stick to basic protocols. Shortwave radio transmissions, encryption software, standard drops in crowded places, zigzags on foreign travel. They were able to piece the puzzle together because of that.”

  “You’d think spies would wise up and try something new or vary their routines.”

  She shook her head. “It’s like bomb makers, Decker. I learned a lot about them as an EOD. Once they learn a way to do something they don’t like to deviate from it. It’s called a bomb signature. That way they work out all the kinks and they don’t get blown up, but it also helps us identify a particular—”

  Decker got up from his chair and walked out.

  Brown jumped up. “Decker? Decker!”

  She raced after him.

  CHAPTER

  37

  “WOW!” EXCLAIMED BROWN.

  She and Decker had just entered Berkshire’s luxurious condo.

  Brown looked around in amazement. “You were right about her having money.”

  Decker didn’t respond. He made a beeline down the hall and Brown quickly followed. He went into the master bathroom and then into the separate toilet closet. He snatched the toilet paper off the wall, slid off the roll, and opened the tube.

  “Damn.”

  There was nothing there.

  “What did you expect to find?” asked Brown.

  He pushed past her, left the bathroom, and moved down the hall. He entered the second bedroom and pushed open the door to the en suite bathroom. He stared down at the toilet paper roll.

  He took it off the wall, slid open the tube, and there it was.

  “A key,” said Brown.

  “Like you said, spies don’t like to learn new techniques, like bomb makers.”

  “So she used this device before?”

  “At the cottage in the woods, yeah.”

  “What’s it a key to?”

  Decker looked at it more closely. “Could be lots of different things. A padlock, maybe.”

  They left the bathroom and he perched on a chair in the guest bedroom. He closed his eyes and let the frames roll back and forth.

  Brown watched him curiously. “Checking the old memory?”

  He said nothing.

  A minute later he opened his eyes and stood. He went out into the hall and over to the broad set of windows that looked out onto the street below.

  “If you had something important that you didn’t want to keep here, but you wanted it close, what would you do?” he asked.

  “Put it at a storage place.”

  “There aren’t any around here,” said Decker, looking out the window. “This is too high-rent a district for it to make economic sense.”

  “But, like you said, she’d want it reasonably accessible.”

  “Yes, she would. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later they passed the Catholic school where Berkshire had worked. Decker pointed across the street.

  Brown looked where he was pointing.

  “A to Z Storage?”

  “And hopefully everything in between.”

  They drove into the parking lot and climbed out of the car. Inside, they showed the woman behind the counter their official creds. She looked up Berkshire’s name on the database. “She paid for one year in advance. Still has a few months to go.”

  “Don’t count on her renewing,” said Decker. He held up the key. “Which unit?”

  “I’m not sure I can allow that without a warrant.”

  Brown said, “We have reason to believe that Ms. Berkshire has been storing explosives in that unit.”

  “Oh my holy Lord,” exclaimed the woman.

  “So before we call the bomb squad we need to check it out. Or we can wait for the warrant and just hope you and this business don’t get blown into the sky.”

  “It’s Unit 2213,” blurted the woman. “Out that door and to the right. Do you think I should leave the premises? I don’t want to die for minimum wage.”

  “I think now would be a great time for you to take a break, yeah,” said Brown.

  The woman fled out the door, got into her car, and drove off with a screeching of tires.

  Decker glanced at Brown. “I’m beginning to see you in a whole new light.”

  She smiled but said nothing as they walked to Unit 2213. It was a single unit with a roll-up door. Decker used the key to unlock the thick padlock, then bent down, gripped the door’s handle, and pulled the door up.

  Inside was a single shelf with a solitary box on it.

  “Looks promising,” said Brown.

  They walked over and examined the box. It was plain cardboard with no writing on the sides or top. Decker pulled out his pocketknife and slit the tape, unsealing the box.

  He opened the flaps and looked inside. He started pulling objects out and placing them on the shelf next to the box.

  What looked like a security badge.

  A typewritten paper in Cyrillic.

  An old floppy disk.

  And a doll.

  While Brown looked at the paper, Decker examined the doll.

  Brown said, “This is dated May 1985. It looks to be some sort of official communication from Moscow. The KBG.”

  “You can read Russian?”

  “Along with Chinese and Arabic. And I can hold my own with Korean.”

  “Impressive.”

  “It’s part of my job, Decker.”

  He had been probing the doll with his fingers until something gave and a compartment popped open. Decker looked inside, but it was empty. “You can see that there’s where the batteries would go.”

  “Okay.”

  He used the blade of his pocketknife to probe around inside the battery compartment. There was a tiny pop and the whole battery compartment slid out, revealing a space just behind it.

  She said, “I’m betting that was not put there by the toy manufacturer.”

  Decker nodded. “And it’s big enough for a roll of microfiche or a microdot or whatever else they used back then.”

&
nbsp; “How do you know about microdots?”

  “I watched enough old James Bond films.”

  He looked at the floppy disk. “Old technology like this.” He picked up the security badge. The name that had once been on it had been clipped out. But Decker held it up to Brown.

  The golden torch with the black background and red atomic ellipses hugging the globe.

  “DIA seal,” Decker said. “She wasn’t a whistleblower.”

  “She was a spy,” finished Brown.

  CHAPTER

  38

  DECKER, BROWN, BOGART, Jamison, and Milligan were sitting around a conference table at the WFO staring at the middle of the table.

  Sitting there were the items Decker and Brown had found at the storage unit and then placed in evidence bags. All the items had been checked for prints and other forensics, but the tests had come back negative.

  Bogart picked up the doll and examined the secret compartment.

  Milligan slid the ID badge over and looked at it. “You said you checked and Berkshire, or whatever her name really is, never worked at DIA?”

  “That’s right,” said Brown. “She would have been thoroughly vetted, undergone a background check, and her prints would have been taken and kept on our database. She’s not there.”

  Bogart put the doll down, cleared his throat, and said, “We’ve checked all of our databases and can find no record of her. If she worked either in a government agency or as a contractor requiring a security clearance her prints would have been on file. They weren’t.”

  Decker sat staring down at his hands.

  Jamison glanced at him. “What do you think, Amos?”

  “I think the part of the badge clipped out had someone else’s name.”

  “If it were an RFID badge,” said Milligan, referring to radio frequency identification devices, “it would be full of the holder’s data unless it had been electronically wiped clean.”

  “But it isn’t,” said Decker. “It was obviously issued before that technology was used, at least by DIA.”

  Brown said, “Berkshire could have been the mole’s handler. She wouldn’t need to be on a database or have a badge to do that. The person on the inside would, of course. But Berkshire could have just managed the asset and collected the intel.”

  “That is far more likely,” said Decker. “We just have to find out who that person on the inside was.”

  “But do you think Berkshire was still acting as a handler?” said Milligan. “I mean the old badge, the floppy disk, the 1980s KGB communication, it all dates from another era.”

  Bogart said, “That’s a good point. She might have retired and decided to do something else with her life.”

  “Good works, you mean,” said Jamison. “Maybe to atone for what she’d done in the past.”

  “But where does the money come in?” asked Brown. “Handlers are not known to make fortunes. And if she was working for the Russians, why not just go back there when she retired?”

  “Maybe she couldn’t,” said Decker.

  They all looked at him.

  “Why wouldn’t she be able to?” asked Brown.

  “Why would a Russian operative be unwelcome back in Russia?” said Decker.

  “Because they turned against their country,” answered Brown.

  “Are you saying Berkshire was a double agent?” said Bogart.

  “I’m saying it’s possible she was a spy and then was turned.”

  “But if she was wouldn’t there be some evidence of that?” asked Milligan. “Some record?”

  “Well, since we just discovered this possibility now, we have to pose that question to the right people.”

  “If it was over thirty years ago it might be hard to find the right people to ask,” noted Bogart.

  Decker looked at Brown. “You know this world better than we do. Where would you look?”

  “There are lots of intelligence agencies, Decker, with overlap. Hundreds of thousands of human assets spread over two hundred countries.”

  “So needle in a haystack,” commented Jamison.

  “Compounded by the fact that the clandestine community doesn’t like to answer questions about anything,” added Brown.

  “And if we ask they may not tell us the truth anyway,” said Milligan.

  “I wouldn’t bet the farm on it,” opined Brown.

  Bogart said, “If she was managing an asset within DIA or another of the intelligence agencies, that asset may still be around. Berkshire might have retired, but that doesn’t mean the asset did.”

  “That’s true,” said Brown.

  “But where do you think the money came from?” asked Jamison.

  “If she turned to our side and helped us out, could the cash have come from there?” asked Decker, looking at Brown.

  “Depending on the significance of the assistance. But if she were a spy the basic leverage might have been help us or go to prison, not a penthouse.”

  “But if she wasn’t caught but came forward voluntarily?” said Decker. “Maybe she didn’t reveal herself as a spy but rather as a citizen with some special knowledge looking to help?”

  Brown thought about that. “I don’t know how likely that would be.”

  Bogart said, “The tricky part is how do we organize an investigation along these lines? We have four items here and a dead woman who might or might not have been a spy or a handler or something else.”

  Decker said, “The first thing we have to do is find out who Anne Berkshire really is. Or was.”

  “What the hell do you think we’ve been trying to do, Decker?” exclaimed Milligan.